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Poem from A Constellation of Kisses featured on The Writer's Almanac

Picture
Friday, October 4, 2019
​Gate C22
 
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
 
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
 
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
 
                                    —Ellen Bass
Picture
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New Jersey 07006

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  • Home
  • About
    • Awards
  • Contact
  • Forthcoming
    • Rachel Custer
    • Mildred Barya
  • Our Titles
    • Redux Series
    • Poetry Books >
      • NEW--This Strange Garment, by Nicole Callihan
      • NEW—Paradise Is Jagged, by Ann Fisher-Wirth
      • NEW--The Mayapple Forest, by Kim Ports Parsons
      • NEW--Leave Me a Little Want, by Beverly Burch
      • NEW--Notes from the Column of Memory, by Wendy Drexler
      • NEW--The Night Divers, by Melanie McCabe
      • NEW--light waves, by Kirsten Shu-ying Chen
      • NEW--Horse Not Zebra, by Eric Nelson
      • NEW--Design, by Theresa Burns
      • NEW--House Bird, by Robb Fillman
      • Years Beyond the River, by David Axelrod
      • The Poet & The Architect, by Christine Stewart-Nunez
      • Wind Apples, by Jeff Ewing
      • The Feast Delayed, by Diane LeBlanc
      • These Few Seeds, by Meghan Sterling
      • The Curator's Notes, by Robin Rosen Chang
      • A Cartography of Home, by Hayden Saunier
      • Tell Me How You Got Here, by Emily Franklin
      • Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, by Patricia Clark
      • Ghost Dogs, by Dion O'Reilly
      • A Kinship with Ash, by Heather Swan
      • Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, by Yvonne Zipter
      • Somatic, by Ann Keniston
      • The Honey of Earth, by David Graham
      • Sugar Fix, by Kory Wells
      • The Davids Inside David, by Sarah Wetzel
      • The Bones of Winter Birds, by Ann Fisher-Wirth
      • Strange What Rises, by Gary Whitehead
      • Suspension, by Paige Riehl
      • The Northway, by Lisa Bellamy
      • The Infinite Doctrine of Water, by Michael T. Young
      • Aileron, by Geraldine Connolly
      • No Such Thing As Distance, by Karen Paul Holmes
      • Leaves Surface Like Skin, by Michelle Menting
      • How to Wear This Body, by Hayden Saunier
      • Travel Notes from the River Styx, by Susanna Lang
      • Route 66 and Its Sorrows, by Carolyn Miller
      • Bluewords Greening, by Christine Stewart-Nunez
      • The Canopy, by Patricia Clark
      • Cutting Room, by Jessica de Koninck
      • The Persistence of Longing, by Lynne Knight
      • Confessions of a Captured Angel, by Neil Carpathios
    • Craft Books >
      • NEW--The Strategic Poet
      • The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics
      • The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop
      • The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop
    • Anthologies >
      • A Constellation of Kisses
      • The Book of Donuts, edited by Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham
      • The Doll Collection
  • Submissions
    • Guidelines
    • FAQs
  • Titles for Review
  • Poetry Salon
  • Store
    • Poetry Books
    • Craft Books
    • Anthologies